A City Within the City

Architect Li Hu's Mega Hall Moma project emphasizes public spaces and green design

Beijing is vanishing, the architect Li Hu said one recent evening. It might have sounded like a sensational statement you would expect to hear from one of China's leading architects. The partner-in-charge of Steven Holl Architects in Beijing slid over to the window at his office at the Mega Hall Moma, a luxury apartment development near Dongzhimen, and peered into an empty courtyard.

“There's no coffee shop near here,” the 33-year-old architect said. “The office can't just go out after work for a drink. There's a massage parlor, and that's it.” The firm's office comes rent-free from its client, which owns the development, largely because it can't be rented. “No one wants to work in a gated community,” he says. “And nobody want to live in one either.”

The rush in recent years to buy upscale property around the Central Business District, or anywhere near the city center, over once-popular suburbs like Shunyi, may prove his point. And yet, he explains, in a city growing at the speed of over half a million people a year, the word central has started to lose meaning. “Beijing's turning into a giant suburb,” he says, lamenting the street life that's vanished in the process. “Everywhere in China, the city is disappearing.”

Li Hu's not being sensationally gloomy, nor does it seem, could he be. This is his statement of purpose. When he and his partner and mentor, the American architect Steven Holl, were asked to build a sibling to Mega Hall Moma, the architects might have just mimicked the successful enclave of sleek luxury towers. But Holl and Li Hu set their sights higher--or, more precisely, in-between, as in the spaces that separate buildings, and separate buildings from people.

“How to bring back the street life of the old city under a new modern design, that was our idea,” Li Hu says, with unfriendly words for the very “super block” zoning and hutong-killing development that makes his building possible. “There are certain things we can't change,” he explains, including the placement of the actual buildings, which were planned by a different architect. But to make the best of the situation, the 210,000 square-meter site beckons the public not only with shops and cafes, but a patchwork of green space, becoming what the architects call a city within a city. “We're injecting a different system onto the existing grid.”

No wonder the Linked Hybrid, or “Modern MoMA” as it's been branded, looks unlike any apartment building in Beijing - nor anywhere else for that matter. Its eight 20-storey towers of apartments and commercial space are connected by gently sloping footbridges, which allow free circulation between shops, cafes, a health club, and exhibition spaces. The elevated plaza in the middle features a reflecting pool, a series of gardens, a four-screen cinema with an outdoor projection and a hotel, from which anyone can enter the bridge loop.

Brochures call the design “filmic,” which somehow captures the dramatic sweep of the buildings, with their silver facades and colorful film-frame windows, as they swirl around in a walk-able storyline. But the non-linear design emphasizes surprise and disjuncture too, the random relationships and occurrences more typical of a city than a standard Beijing apartment block. “It's not just about convenience,” Li Hu says of the building's connectivity, “but about the connection between people.” In that sense, the building vaguely resembles a ring of dancers celebrating the public space at their feet.

Still, considering that the apartments' current price tag (RMB 7.3 million on average) is over three hundred times greater than a typical Beijinger's yearly income, some might wonder if the dancers are merely trampling on everyday Beijing rather than cheering it. Li Hu doesn't just acknowledge the irony of a luxury public space in a city like this; he sees the mix of public and private uses as the project's central challenge, and its raison d'etre. Mention the building's sex appeal, and he gets uncomfortable. His architecture is not “sexy,” he urges - it's social.

Li Hu's and Holl's other big project, a mixed-use development in Shenzhen that will house the offices of Chinese mainland real estate developer Vanke, embraces a social role too. The snaking, cubist aluminum structure, what Li Hu calls a “horizontal skyscraper,” floats above the ground on pillars, creating a large public space beneath. At a time when public space is competing with private development, Li Hu sees such designs as vital. “How do you convince private developers to make a social contribution?” he ponders.

Similar questions prompted him to start his own firm with his wife, the architect Huang Wenjing, in 2002. For now, Open Architecture Studio's affordable and modular housing designs remain the subject of research, though Li Hu speaks of actual construction (and of future full-time work on his own firm) with a sense of urgency. “Architects tend to only serve the top classes,” he says. “We're trying to make architecture available to everyone.”

With the Linked Hybrid, the architect's ambitions are no less grand: “We want to change how people live, react, relate, and interact with other people.” It was an ambition that the developer, the Modern Land Group, didn't exactly share. At certain points, everything from the bridges, which test the limits of building code, to the mix of commercial and residential space to the project's openness, was questioned. “There was no desire, no activity, no support for this,” he says of the client, and a campaign of “educating and fighting” ensued. Even as costs have risen, Li Hu says he's not made a single compromise in the design. Still, he adds, “we're still trying to convince them today.”

Such determination is one of the biggest clues to Li Hu's background. After graduating from the architecture department at Tsinghua University, he left his hometown of Beijing to spend ten years abroad, first at Rice University in Houston, then in Princeton and in New York, working for Steven Holl. The experience in the U.S. and New York in particular (where he lives part-time) not only heightened his appreciation for good urban design; it raised his suspicions of government planning boards and demanding clients - two staples of China's architectural scene. “They criticize me for not knowing their way of working,” Li Hu says of pesky apparatchiks. “And I don't want to work that way.”

One thing that both architect and developer could agree on from the start was that the building should have a light “environmental footprint” (impact). Green space covers almost every flat surface, from the roof gardens to the seven mounds of the central plaza. The pond water there is constantly recycled along with the building's wastewater, and displacement ventilation ducts embedded in apartment floors circulate fresh air and reduce heat loss while pipes in the concrete slab ceilings provide super-efficient temperature control. Underneath the site sits one of the world's largest geothermal systems, an array of hundreds of 100-meter wells that draw heat to the apartments in the winter and pull heat out in the summer, eliminating the need for boilers or electrical air conditioners.

The green focus has garnered a nod from Popular Science and earned the building a coveted US Green Building Council LEED pre-certification, one of a handful in China. “We did everything you can imagine in one residential building.”

But Li Hu is less interested in the technology inside the buildings than the life in-between them. The Linked Hybrid's “city within a city” approach not only reorients the urban scene to a human scale, but also attempts to make cars obsolete for its residents. “Saving the environment,” says Li Hu, “that dimension is much larger than a geothermal system,” he says. “It's about density, and public transportation, and your lifestyle.” He hopes that the building's philosophy will soon provide a low-cost model for future low-cost housing in the city.

Whether Beijing can embrace an approach to development that's just as holistic and hybrid, will depend on the collaborations of city planners, developers and architects, he says. “Saving the city is not an individual effort.” What role he and his building will play ultimately depends on the city's biggest interest group: the public. “If you create a space that works, there's a potential for people to use it,” he says. “And then it will not be doomed.”

a version of this article appeared in that's Beijing HOME